Dennis Taylor’s dream realized, months after his death

After a lifetime spent playing saxophone for others, helping Grammy-winning notables such as Delbert McClinton and Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown realize their musical ambitions, Nashville session and stage musician Dennis Taylor recorded his debut album in 2010, at age 56.

It was precisely the album he’d wanted to make, with rousing, New Orleans-inspired jazz and R&B, soulful blues and even a Beatles ballad, filtered through Taylor’s distinctive sensibility and aided by roaring Hammond organ and crackling drums. It was, for the first time, a full expression of his own musical art, which had previously been displayed in solos, not songs, and certainly not a full-length album. Taylor approved a cover photo, arrived at a song sequence and was proud of it all.

He then toured in McClinton’s band, played an October show in Greenville, Tex., had a heart attack, and died. Four months later, his album, Steppin’ Up, is available. The Bluebird Café will host a CD release party Sunday afternoon, and Dennis Taylor won’t be there for it.

“A couple of nights before he died, we were sitting on the bus and he said, ‘Man, I want to really thank you for singing on this album,’” says McClinton, whose work on “Since I Fell For You” provides the album’s only vocal. “He said, ‘I’ve wanted to do this forever, and it’s absolutely perfect.’ I looked at him, looked back, and he was gone.”
Taylor played Saturday, Oct. 16, woke Sunday morning with some indigestion and an odd feeling in one arm. The tour bus took him to a hospital, and he got off the bus, raised both arms and swore to his bandmates, “I feel great.” Fifteen minutes later, all was different. McClinton and the band returned to Nashville in mourning and dismay, with nothing to offer Taylor’s wife of 22 years, Nashville singer-songwriter and music publicist Karen Leipziger, but a lovingly maintained, 1958 Selmer Mark VI tenor sax, with no one to play it.

“That horn was his baby,” Leipziger says of the instrument that was Taylor’s for three decades. “It was an extension of him. We were together for three years before he even let me carry it. When they came back to Nashville with the bus, and I saw the horn there...”

She doesn’t finish the statement. After years as a song-scribe and a writer of press releases, words fail. She offers a CD with her husband’s photo on the cover and the words “Dennis Taylor, Steppin’ Up” on it, by way of an explanation. She holds his dream in her hands.

From Vermont To Music City

The blues are not native to Taylor’s hometown of Barton, Vt., a tiny hamlet near the Canadian border. But it was blues, jazz and baseball that fascinated him as a child. He started playing sax at age 9 and baseball before that, and his high school times were filled with The Sporting News and jazz aficionado magazine Downbeat. He was a catcher in high school, but felt himself too small for a baseball career (an opinion shared by other observers).

Taylor attended Boston’s Berklee College of Music, where he could study with top instructors between trips to Fenway Park to watch his beloved Red Sox. He took the study part seriously, internalizing the lessons taught on records by Sonny Rollins, John Coltrane and dozens of other sax greats. Years later, when he became a teacher himself, he encouraged his students to steal, not to borrow, from the masters: Stealing implies ownership, and once a player owns something — a lick, a technique — he may bend it to his own will.

“He had an encyclopedic knowledge of the tradition of blues, rock and soul saxophone,” says The Saxophone Journal’s Andrew Clark, who was planning a Taylor cover story at the time of the Nashville sax man’s death. “He was a saxophonist’s saxophonist.”

The late 1970s found Taylor teaching at Vermont’s Johnson State College and playing in New England combos including the Vermont Jazz Ensemble.

“He was already a very good player back then,” says George Voland, who still plays valve trombone in the Ensemble. “He had a nice, big, fat, classic tenor sound. We all followed his career after he left.”

In 1980, Taylor moved to the jazz hotbed of New Orleans, where he soon joined with “Gatemouth” Brown. Leipziger was working at a booking agency that brought Brown to Boston in February of 1985, and she had a guitar-playing friend who introduced her to Taylor at the show.

“He said he knew when he met me,” she says.

Taylor soon moved to Boston, and he and Leipziger married on August 8, 1988, the date that had the maximum amount of Leipziger’s lucky number. Taylor was fine with all the eights: Red Sox great Carl Yastrzemski wore number eight. Sixteen months later, the newlyweds moved to Music City, where Taylor became a bluesy saxophone man in a town known for twanging guitars, a transplanted New Englander in the drawling southland.

“It’s known as a country music town, but there’s a lot of us laying around the edges that still like the blues,” says legendary guitarist and songwriter Dan Penn, whose writing credits include soul classics “Dark End of the Street” and “Do Right Woman.” “I don’t know how he made those sounds come out of that horn.”

The mid-1990s found Taylor touring with Shelby Lynne, Kenny Rogers and others. He joined blues man Duke Robillard’s band in 1997, and worked with Eddy “The Chief” Clearwater, Brown and many others. After two years in Nashville he began volunteering as a teacher at the W.O. Smith Music School, instructing underprivileged students. He taught there each Tuesday, until his death, turning down countless recording sessions in favor of volunteering.

“As a teacher, he was unparalleled,” says Jonah Rabinowitz, the Smith School’s executive director. “It’s hard to explain to people what it means to know somebody like that: soft-spoken, easygoing, yet the intellect and intensity are amazing. Everything that came out of his mouth was thoughtful.”

Taylor also wrote widely distributed instructional books, and taught private lessons. One of his students, Nik Rodewald, made first chair in the Tennessee All-State jazz band.

“In those lessons, I could learn from him from what he said, but also from hearing him play,” Rodewald says. “Every time he put the horn in his mouth, something good came out.”

Rodewald, 18, has lately been volunteering at the Smith School.

‘If you listen to it, you’ll know Dennis’

In mid-2008, Taylor joined McClinton’s band. It was the ideal gig for him — a chance to play with ace musicians who coexisted peacefully and artfully. Among those musicians was keyboardist Kevin McKendree, a producer and a kindred spirit. Taylor soon voiced his long-suppressed wish to record an album of songs featuring sax, Hammond organ and percussion.

“He told me he’s always wanted to do this,” McKendree says. “I was honored that he wanted me to be the one to help him realize his dream, and he told me when we finished it up, ‘I’m really proud of this.’”

McKendree recommended Taylor for the McClinton job, with Taylor’s tone and demeanor as the top qualifications for employment. McClinton soon came to appreciate those and other qualities.

“He could say something in a gentle way that made you understand exactly what was going on,” McClinton says. “One night, I said or did something, and he corrected me with a smile, and after that instead of telling him stuff I started asking him things.”

Taylor and McKendree finished the album in what they couldn’t have known was just in time. Leipziger pledged help with creative and business aspects of the endeavor.

“When it was done, it was exactly what he wanted it to be,” she says. “If you listen to it, you’ll know Dennis. You’ll know his influences, his humor, his warmth and his playfulness. The week he left, we talked about the sequencing and agreed on a couple of little changes.”

And then Dennis Taylor, who rode his bicycle for miles, practiced sax for hours every morning and lived with consideration, not abandon, died. He left a wife and a band and a sparking album and a legacy that extends beyond liner notes. Among his biggest regrets would have been missing the trip he was planning to take with his father to the Baseball Hall of Fame, and missing seeing his students find their successes. One of those students, Nik Rodewald, made his way to Taylor’s house the day after he died, and some months before Rodewald would be accepted into the prestigious Berklee school Taylor attended.